The best Financial Services executives demonstrate comprehensive leadership competencies – plus the ability to persevere through years of crisis and disruption.

The demands on Financial Services leaders have expanded dramatically in recent years. Strategic vision and results orientation are now just a starting point. Today senior executives must also excel at collaboration, influence and change leadership, while demonstrating personal resilience in the face of prolonged crisis.

Egon Zehnder consultants are experts in attracting, developing, and retaining leaders with all those strengths and more.

What sets us apart?

Deep Industry Knowledge

The Financial Services Practice Group includes 130 Egon Zehnder consultants, all with extensive experience in a range of financial services areas. Our Practice Group conducts more than 1000 executive searches per year. We work in both mature and emerging markets with a focus on strategic, complex assignments including searches for Financial Services CEOs, senior executives, general managers, and board members. We also work with Financial Services companies to assess and develop their current talent, and to optimize executive team performance.

Specialized Expertise

Consultants in our Practice are experts across a variety of industries and functional specialties, including:

Our experienced consultants help you pursue bold new talent strategies that keep you ahead of ongoing shifts in the Financial Services landscape. We work closely with you to assess talent based on critical experience, core competencies, and leadership potential. We help you make better people decisions for critical roles, systematically increase your leaders’ readiness to take on bigger challenges, build a sustainable talent pipeline, and ensure that your leadership teams have the diverse strengths required to create competitive advantage.

Collaborative Approach

Our consultants work as your partners to assemble and develop world-class leadership teams. Referencing our globally researched benchmarks, we help you pinpoint your ideal leaders’ demonstrated competencies, personality traits, and behavioral characteristics, so you can objectively benchmark internal and external candidates against the same rigorously defined standard. Significantly, we also help you assess leadership potential – using a unique methodology that helps you anticipate how your rising leaders will perform in new and more demanding executive roles – to help you create more accurate and reliable leadership development and succession plans.

Personal, Global Search

When the candidate profile calls for external search, our consultants personally and confidentially engage their local and global relationships and Egon Zehnder colleagues to identify candidates prepared to meet your needs. All of our consultants are motivated via our equal partnership structure and fixed-fee pricing policy to work on your behalf. The power of this trusted network places the insight and resources of our entire firm at each consultant’s fingertips, making our solutions richer and more responsive, and creating tangible and enduring business impact for our clients. Your search consultants are supported by a dedicated team of researchers who simultaneously run your requirements through relevant segments of our database, which continually tracks top executive and director talent worldwide. Through this rigorous process, we closely examine candidates who demonstrate a potential match, analyzing critical incidents in their careers for insights into how they might navigate the challenges they would face in your targeted role.

Close Connections

We are in close contact with top Financial Services executives, technical experts, and functional leaders in each geography. We know who can meet your needs and how to attract them to your company. As we move deeper into conversation with interested, well-qualified candidates, we conduct interviews grounded in our sophisticated and rigorously validated leadership Competency and Potential Model. Our evaluation encompasses far more than the customary professional track record check and referencing. We methodically surface the candidate’s full range of capabilities, personal tendencies and behavioral characteristics, gain penetrating insights into their readiness to perform in the targeted leadership role, and assess how smoothly candidates would integrate into your organization and culture.

Trust-based Negotiation

Our consultants invest personally in their relationships with candidates, gaining intimate understanding of their requirements and concerns. So as your search progresses into the hiring phase, we are thoroughly prepared to serve as problem solvers and facilitators. Our fixed-fee policy assures that we can play this vital yet sensitive role with no conflict of interest.

Accelerated Integration

Our value add does not end with a successful hire. For newly appointed senior executives, the first few weeks and months in the role are critical. They must quickly understand the organization’s culture, set the right priorities, and establish credibility with colleagues and stakeholders. Our Accelerated Integration service speeds your new executive’s journey to full impact. We start supporting executives well before “Day One” in a new role – ideally, as soon as the appointment decision is made. Working in collaboration with the hiring manager and the HR manager, we help your executive build an accurate and insightful picture of the upcoming integration challenge, making the keys to leadership success vividly clear and crafting a plan to hit the ground running. We also work personally with the welcoming leadership team as well as the executive to quickly cultivate interpersonal trust and open dialogue. Through the first 90 days, our consultants gather and distill candid feedback on the first impressions the executive is creating during the initial integration. We meet one-on-one with the executive at regular intervals – creating “islands of time” to allow them briefly to set aside all-consuming operational priorities, reflect on progress, identify and prioritize early wins, and calibrate their approach as needed.

Assured Results

We pride ourselves on the fact that most of our client relationships are long-term. We earn your loyalty by being consistently effective, energetically responsive to your needs, and tenaciously committed to your ongoing success. Our goal across all our services is to help you make better people decisions for critical roles, systematically increase your leaders’ readiness to take on bigger challenges, build a sustainable talent pipeline, and ensure that your leadership teams have the diverse strengths required to create competitive advantage.